This collaborative weaving activity was inspired by the Craft artist Tanya Aguiniga. During this transformational act, common furniture such as a ladder, table, or chair, takes the place of a loom. Participants become the artist by wrapping and weaving yarn around the objects.
This collaborative drawing activity was inspired by artist William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects. Participants were asked to stand over a communal canvas on the floor, swing a mark-making tool attached to the end of a string, and create layered designs on the surface below. They experimented with different types of mark-making tools, repeating the motion in an effort to achieve controlled marks
Using the work of featured artists Nick Cave and Peter Tully as inspiration, participants selected from a range of common, everyday materials to create wearable art. Then attached materials like bread ties, plastic bags, and fabric scraps to a series of garments and see them come to life by the end of the evening.
This experience pulled from Kjartansson’s recurring interests in repetition, duration, music, and performance. Participants sat in front of an easel and listened to a sound played by a live musician; then responded to the sound by repeating a mark on the page for a set period of time. They worked collectively on canvases, creating a layered effect that signified the overlap of multiple sounds building up over time.
This Art Encounters session encouraged participants to take part in creating a paper mural inspired by Henri Matisse and his work in the MFAH collections. Based on the final chapter in Matisse’s long artistic career, in which he began making large-scale works using paper cutouts, participants cut out their own paper shapes and pinned them onto a communal board. The result? A large, collective piece reminiscent of Matisse’s murals.
This Art Encounters was inspired by the exhibition Beatriz González: A Retrospective. González created powerful and responsive works of art that often referenced domestic space and her Colombian heritage. “Collaging Space” looked to González’s creative process. For this project, participants were encouraged to transform recycled furniture into works of art. They were asked to look for ideas in newspapers and recycled food boxes, and select images or passages of text from them. Then collage and paint onto the surfaces of communal furniture pieces.
This session invited museum visitors to participate in a call and response collaboration inspired by the exhibition Jasper Johns: 100 Variations on a Theme. Just as Johns explored the same elements again and again for his 100 prints, featured artist Delaney Smith asked participants to work and rework paper using basic tools such as a stapler. The guidelines for interacting with the surface of paper were created and carried out by participants. The work’s collaborative evolution culminated in an installation based on play and manipulation.
This project asked: What other factors, besides color, cause people to associate an object with a gender? Inspired by the work of artist JeongMee Yoon, participants were encouraged to question the gender association imposed on objects. Her series The Pink & Blue Project documents the possessions of young children and demonstrates the use of color to target a specific gender. Museum visitors were invited to participate by choosing an object from an array of options provided, being photographed with the object, and then pinning the image under a category: masculine or feminine.
